Banking

Consumer banking has undergone a dramatic operational transformation over recent years, but the imperative to increase sales remains unchanged. The Internet, contact centers, advanced kiosks, ATMs, SMS and other channels have all helped to free up front-office branch and sales staff from transactional activities, but banks have frequently been unable to use these new capabilities to sign up new customers or to increase their share of customer wallet. Most bank executives are certain that transactional channels can be leveraged to generate sales, but are not sure how.

For banks that have a relatively high share of their market, these ‘direct’ channels are the best avenue for increasing revenue profitably, namely by leveraging customer relationships to cross-sell. Effective management of these channels is also critical to retain customers and increase their lifetime value. Yet the practical mechanisms for increasing sales and retaining customers can be elusive, and often require new perspectives on how banks’ complex operating models should be managed.

Solutions need to resolve persistent issues, including who ‘owns’ the customer, how channel revenue should be imputed from new sales, and how leads captured in one channel can be efficiently pursued through another. Similarly, core products and account opening processes need to be suitable for selling through non-face-to-face environments.

Retail financial institutions with smaller market shares and a limited physical presence need to attract and sign up new customers through their direct channels. For these organizations, the overriding challenge is to attract additional customers at low cost. Although operating models are often substantially simpler when a branch network is not in the channel mix, their success hinges even more on effective product design and consistency in branding and servicing.

Without clarity in the rules, boundaries and roles between and within which operational units function, banks’ increasingly interdependent production and delivery models have the potential to constrain managers and effective decision-making. The number of practical top-level options for how a bank operates is in fact quite finite, although there is substantial scope for differentiation within these alternatives. Even as an organization evolves, it is incumbent on executives to define and articulate clear visions for how their organization is structured to attract and serve customers.

Your retail bank thus needs a technology partner who understands your bank and its customer perspectives, and provides innovative and effective technology solutions. Visionet offers services in corporate, retail and internet banking:

• Custom application development & maintenance
• Integration platform- Real time and batch information exchange with bank’s external vendors.
• Interfaces to other application
• Transaction data warehousing